A BRICS member has been under attack for months, and has subsequently launched its own attacks against other members. Next weekend, those countries will all be in the same room, making a third attempt to find consensus on a war that has dominated global attention (and battered economies) this year. Tehran and Abu Dhabi on opposite sides. Russian President Vladimir Putin landed in New Delhi on Friday morning. The Sept. 12-13 summit in New Delhi comes more than six months after the United States and Israel launched attacks on Iran, which has been a member of the BRICS since 2024. The United Arab Emirates also joined that year. The group of emerging countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa and, in more recent years, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Ethiopia and Indonesia) was created to challenge the Western-led order. As the alliance approaches its 20th anniversary, analysts say that while the BRICS have helped make the world more multipolar, they have struggled to build a coherent alternative to the West. The bloc has created a platform outside Western-led institutions, giving countries in the Global South greater bargaining power and economic alternatives. But the dollar remains dominant and divisions limit collective action on foreign policy and security, analysts say. However, some experts argue that the success of the BRICS should not be measured by whether they can represent an alternative to Western-led institutions, but by whether they make Western dominance more difficult to exert. Jazeera. “Yes, it does not have the institutionality or capacity of the UN to address specific geopolitical issues, but its mere existence is a much more important platform for countries in the Global South to express their voices and bypass the West in cooperation.” Born to challenge the West. While the BRICS were built to challenge the US-led Western order, they were never intended to replace it, analysts said. Doha Round: trade negotiations that aimed to reform the international trade system in favor of countries in the Global South. “The countries that were spearheaded to become the next ‘developed’ nations understood that their voices would be better heard if they organized as a group,” Oliveira and Godinho said. The BRICS emerged from these countries’ efforts to pursue a common development agenda outside traditional international organizations and the United Nations, and in that sense their very origins challenged the Western-led order, Brazilian academics said. The emerging powers wanted greater influence over the institutions they felt dominated by the West. And that’s an important priority that still unites the group today, says Sean Burges, associate professor of international studies at Carleton University in Canada. “The two priorities that unite the BRICS countries are largely the desire to make a lot of money through international trade and to end the ‘West’ preaching about where they are failing in terms of rights and democracy,” Burges told Al Jazeera. Analysts agreed that reform and greater autonomy have been much bigger concerns for the BRICS bloc than overthrowing the crumbling liberal international order. “Why would the BRICS want to take on the global governance responsibilities of the G7 members?” Burgess asked. The BRICS have offered their member countries alternative avenues to channel trade and investment that serve the interests of member countries, primarily national development and poverty alleviation, he explained. “China’s focus on unconditional development assistance and Brazil’s discussions on direct currency swaps between central banks are two of the most obvious examples,” Burges said. This has resulted in an increase in economic exchange not only within the BRICS, but within the Global South in general, he added. – evidence of how institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) are already changing – Burges argued. At the same time, the very idea of the so-called West has changed dramatically since the early 2000s, when the BRICS were conceived and formalized, operating in a completely different global environment, notes Guy Burton, a geopolitical and policy analyst. “It is not clear which BRICS would pose a challenge, or to whom, the United States or Europe,” Burton told Al Jazeera. Great economic weight, limited collective power. Although the economic weight of the BRICS is enormous, their ability to exercise it collectively is not, analysts agreed. The bloc accounts for almost half of the world’s population, 40 percent of global output in terms of purchasing power, 44 percent of oil production and about a quarter of global trade, says Imran Khalid, a geostrategic analyst. and senior fellow at Foreign Policy in Focus. The 11-member group is growing at about 3.7 percent this year compared with 1 percent for the G7, according to IMF figures, he added. Even so, its “leverage is weaker than [BRICS group] The size suggests,” Khalid told Al Jazeera. “The New Development Bank (NDB) had approved about $39 billion in total by the end of 2024, which is a few months of World Bank commitments, and it still raises most of its money in dollars,” he said, referring to the global financial institution created by the bloc. Brazilian academics Oliveira and Godinho also said the NDB has not introduced significant innovations to challenge the West, and many of its features mirror those of development existing multilateral system. And its contribution to global GDP still lags behind the G7, with China and India primarily driving the group’s economic expansion, Oliveira and Godinho said. Perhaps the most significant limitation to the BRICS’ ability to challenge Western economic power is its continued structural dependence on the US dollar, analysts agreed. While China has boosted use of the renminbi and Saudi Arabia has floated trade in other currencies, the dollar does not face any serious challenge, and is unlikely to do so over the next decade, Burton said. “The bloc as a whole is not moving away from the dollar; “Individual members are reducing their own exposure, one ratio at a time,” Khalid said. “That is slower and is also harder to reverse.” Still, Oliveira and Godinho say, the economic achievements of the BRICS group should not be ignored.[The NDB] It is the first financial institution without Western countries, although it still operates within the [liberal international order]”, they said. Meanwhile, the bloc’s expansion in 2024 has enhanced its collective influence, with the addition of major oil producers such as Saudi Arabia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates strengthening its influence in global energy markets, Oliveira and Godinho said. Chinese investment in other BRICS countries, including through its Belt and Road Initiative, and other bilateral flows are also “offering concrete alternatives for the financing and development of emerging economies, operating outside the traditional framework of the Bretton Woods institutions. [World Bank and IMF]”, they added. United by ambition, divided by interests The BRICS’ greatest strength – its ability to represent a large sector of the world’s population – may also be its greatest weakness: divisions persist among member states. At a meeting of the group’s foreign ministers in May, also in India, the BRICS failed to form a consensus on the US-Israel war against Iran. Burton, however, said the bloc’s expansion has made the BRICS’ internal divisions more confusing, no less. “It broadens the representation of the Global South but dilutes any coherent position the group had,” he argued. As for Iran, he added, BRICS membership gave Tehran a platform, but that does not mean that the bloc’s members are aligning themselves with the country. “There is no ‘one for all, all for one’ logic in BRICS: members deliberately preserve their freedom to act independently, which is the opposite of a coordinated bloc,” Burton Burges agreed. and said that even if the group has had a shared ambition to have a broader voice in international affairs, there is still dissent there. “All members want to have more voice, but they do not agree at all with the message.” Oliveira and Godinho noted that while initially the limited number of members was a problem considering the diversity of the Global South, its expansion now risks undermining the group’s collective achievements. Still, they see the bloc’s new members and a growing queue of countries seeking to be part. of BRICS as a positive indicator of the group’s future: “The fact that countries with such divergent interests can sit together is in itself evidence of a changing multipolar system.” So are the BRICS really challenging the West? Overall, the BRIC bloc is a platform for autonomy rather than a challenge to the Western-led order, says Khalid. It has facilitated trade outside Western institutions, he said, and given countries in the Global South more room to maneuver between Washington and Beijing. Most significantly, Khalid said, the BRICS have perhaps emerged as “a challenge to how cheaply the West can apply pressure to individual countries.”
